Design and Implementation of a Low-Cost Software Defined Wireless Network Testbed for Smart Home

The evolvable nature of software defined wireless networking offers great opportunities toward the design and implementation of a low-cost network testbed for smart home. Programmability is an essential component on a network gateway to enable efficient management of energy and other network resources for secure, scalable, and cost-effective solutions. In this paper, we proposed a software defined edge-cloud network architecture for smart home. We studied the programmable features of several popular SoC and FPGA platforms and design a software defined wireless network testbed for smart home by integrating several open-source projects including OpenWrt, Lede, and OpenFlow, which may be extended for other application scenarios such as smart grid and Internet-of-Things. We implemented WiFi, BLE, and ZigBee networking features on our low-cost FPGA and SoC platforms and evaluated the TCP and UDP throughput on our testbed. We conducted a series of experiments on our testbed and examined optimization issues based on recent developments in SDN. Our testbed may provide experiment supports for advancing smart home research and development.